Portal: research-creation,speculative architecture and the subterranean imaginary

Abstract

Research-creation is an approach to research that integrates arts-based practices and methods from project formulation to implementation and dissemination. This paper presents an entry to the 2024 Antepavilion architecture competition for a temporary folly on a site in Inner London, which formed a research-creation element of a wider research project on play and counterplay in contemporary urbanism. The proposal reflects on the playful but essentially disposable nature of the ‘pop-up’ and develops a satirical critique of the construction industry drawing on the work of the Planetary Portals research group, the Pritzker Prize-winning architect Jacques Herzog and the Arctic scholar Charlotte Wrigley. Extrapolating from the subterranean imaginaries of Jules Verne and the innovative engineering of the Brunels, father and son, the proposal takes the extractivism of contemporary construction to its (il)logical conclusion. This work demonstrates the potential of research-creation in transposing architectural and geographical thinking and generating unexpected insights in both fields.

Introduction: the Antepavilion architecture competition

Geographical perspectives are increasingly salient in the vanguard of architectural discourse today. The Anthropocene has currency in the rhetoric of global ‘starchitects’ and graduate design school studios. ¹ Principles of regenerative design guide the research and practice of myriad architecture ‘think-and-do tanks’. ² More-than-human planetary perspectives combine with architectural methods to produce speculative cartographies. ³ And, most recently, geologies of race are the focus of the current British Pavilion at the 2025 Venice Biennale of Architecture. ⁴ By comparison, London’s Antepavilion programme is a minnow: an annual architectural competition which invites design proposals for the construction of a folly in an Inner London location – a contemporary and very urban take on the English picturesque. The site belongs to a property developer cum cultural entrepreneur, and a different brief is provided each year. ⁵ The winners are invited to construct their design on a shoestring budget with their own sweat equity. Now in its seventh year, the commission has already yielded a series of quirky temporary structures which have caught the imagination of the local architecture community and recruited its voluntary labour. The winning ‘pop-ups’ have also demonstrated a distinct reluctance to ‘pop-down’, instead accumulating over time and leading to a series of protracted disputes with the local planning authority, Hackney Council. ⁶

The Antepavilions exemplify the phenomenon of the pop-up in that they express the ‘vernacular’ of the creative city ⁷ while normalising the precarious terms of its production. ⁸ Notwithstanding their ephemeral quality, pop-ups have become an increasingly permanent fixture of London’s urban scene. ⁹ In their quirky aesthetic and libertarian opportunism, they also offer an archetypal demonstration of how contemporary urban life (at least in London) is increasingly mediated through practices of play and counterplay. To explore this topic I prepared my own entry for the 2024 competition in the spirit of research-creation, an approach that combines creative and scholarly research practices in ‘more-than-disciplinary ways’. ¹⁰ The brief called for an earthwork on a site near the Old Kent Road, on the corner of Pages’ Walk and Mandela Way, with the entry format limited to two A3 pages. ¹¹ My proposal, reproduced in edited form below, draws on the work of the Planetary Portals research group as well as archival materials from the Brunel Museum, and reflects on the extractivism of the construction industry in London. Through this satirical thought experiment the article offers a modest contribution to geographical perspectives in contemporary architectural discourse. Following the competition entry, the paper concludes with a brief reflection on the potential for research-creation in the production of geographical knowledge itself. ¹²

Portal: an Antepavilion for the Anthropocene

London’s skyline: a panorama of extractivism

If London is increasingly a high-rise city, its skyline ever more clearly represents an ‘inverted mine-scape’. ¹³ Its clusters of soaring structures evidence the ‘mobility of minerality’. ¹⁴ This panorama of extractivism may be particularly appropriate to a command centre of the global economy, one through which the world’s ores are directed in floes of extraction, processing and distribution: mineral, vegetable, animal and human. Yet it is also a visual and volumetric correlate for the increasing pace and scale of these processes, whether scaled-up to our ever-extending infrastructure (building, transport, drainage, energy, data), or miniaturised for our personal devices (pocket, palm, wrist). The Planetary Portals research group ¹⁵ cautions that ‘whatever “goes up” can be mirror-massed in a network of subterranean voids – no volume comes from nowhere; it always has a material and social debt to pay and always casts a shadow, no matter how far away’. ¹⁶ Consumption continues its relentless outwards and downwards expansion: in 2020, the journal Nature reported that the total mass of human activities now outweighs natural biomass, such that ‘for each person on the globe, anthropogenic mass equal to more than his or her bodyweight is produced every week’. ¹⁷ We are producing a world upside-down.

Contemporary architecture: material entropy

Extractivism is not only a matter of volume, however, but also of value. Pritzker Prize-winner Jacques Herzog framed the matter in explicitly architectural terms, suggesting that contemporary manufacturing in general and architecture in particular involves a progressive devaluation in the ontological state of material. The inevitable outcome is

a kind of synthetic conglomeration in which the resulting materials are barely still recognizable. They are, in a way, so mixed up with other materials that decomposition back into the original form is no longer possible [. . .] these substances, this matter, can only re-enter a natural cycle with great difficulty. This means that after they are scrapped, they harden into a useless degenerated state in a dump or depot. Once there, they become poisonous, life-threatening substances. ¹⁸

Waste from construction, demolition and excavation forms almost two-thirds of all British waste by weight. ¹⁹ Less than 10% of non-hazardous construction waste now goes to landfill, but most of this is downcycled or incinerated rather than returned to the circular economy. ²⁰ If only there was some means to short-circuit this material entropy. Could we find a truly sustainable way to reconnect our extractive cycle of consumption with the renewable cycles of our planetary system? The sole natural process that is capable of rendering and recovering materials from the ‘useless degenerated state’ they are left in by contemporary architecture is – planetary vulcanism! Only through immersion in the coruscating heat of liquid magma can denatured materials finally ‘slip the surly bonds’ of Man’s brutalisation of matter and regain their elemental form and identity. There remains one overarching problem, however: the source of volcanic magma on Earth is in the asthenosphere, a ductile and partly fluid region of the upper mantle. Under London, this lies up to 36 km below the surface of the earth’s crust. ²¹

Geological levels, Victorian endeavours

The obvious and logical solution to this challenging design problem is to construct a disposal chute through the earth’s crust, down which the detritus of human consumption can be returned directly to the upper mantle for recycling at a geological level. This will surpass in depth all existing human excavations, including the deepest art project (Walter de Maria’s 1977 Vertical Earth Kilometer, 1 km, (see Figure 1), ²² the deepest open-pit mine (Bingham Canyon in Utah, 1.2 km), ²³ the deepest sub-surface mine (Mponeng Gold Mine in Gauteng, 3.9 km) ²⁴ and the deepest ever drilling (the Kola Superdeep Borehole in the Murmansk Oblast, over 12 km). ²⁵ The epic scale of this contemporary ‘journey to the centre of the Earth’ ²⁶ is inspired by 19th century engineering; this was, after all, when extractivism first reached industrial scale as it overtook enslavement as driver of the global economy. ²⁷ The proposed structure is modelled on a seminal work of the father-and-son pioneering engineers Marc and Isambard Kingdom Brunel, borrowing the construction technique they developed for the Thames Tunnel access shaft, the world’s first caisson structure, which is located approximately one mile to the north-east of the Antepavilion site and still in use today as part of the Brunel Museum. ²⁸ Commencing construction in 1825, an iron hoop 50 feet in diameter was built directly on the ground, with brickwork laid on top to create a drum 40 feet in height and 3 feet thick. Under its own self-weight, the drum gradually sank into the marshy ground, whereupon the earth inside was progressively excavated and the groundwater pumped out. As the drum descended, additional brick courses were added at the top, which in due course became the lining of the shaft as it descended through the geological strata. The shaft was built downwards: it was a machine for its own undermining, a metaphor apt for today’s extractivist superstructures.

Figure 1.

Walter de Maria, The Vertical Earth Kilometer (1977): a solid brass rod 1 km in length and approximately 5 cm in diameter, whose upper surface reaches ground level in Friedrichsplatz, Kassel, Germany. Photo by the author.

Figure 2.

The inverted mine-scape of London’s contemporary skyline showing, from left to right, the Heron and NatWest towers, the ‘Gherkin’, the ‘Cheesegrater’ and the ‘Walkie-Talkie’. Viewed in section, excavation for the proposed Portal is shown using the Brunel technique. This illustration is based on an original engraving (c.1818-39) from a watercolour by Joseph Pinchback from the archival collection of the Brunel Museum, reproduced with permission. ²⁹ The engraving depicts the ‘Mode of Sinking the Shaft’ showing the brick lining and a steam engine powering the buckets-and-pulley system for soil extraction, with miners digging at the face. Illustration by the author.

Back to the future / ‘Going deep’

For Antepavilion, it is proposed to faithfully reconstruct the Thames Tunnel access shaft structure at approximately half-scale (see Figure 2). Rather than arresting its descent at 75 feet, however, the structure will continue to sink through the lithosphere and reach the upper mantle, where its base will fill not with groundwater but with molten magma. Not only will this surpass new depths of engineering achievement, it will also signal a return to the common sense technical principles of the nineteenth century. This will mark a new phase in the grand tradition of Great British innovation and demonstrate the exciting new possibilities of geo-engineering. It may perhaps even inspire a new cultural aesthetic combining science fiction, history and fantasy, exploring new solutions to market failures in global capitalism: a New Steampunk (like Afrofuturism, only in reverse).

Before embarking on construction of the Portal proper (which will clearly be a long-term project), the initial elements of the structure will be constructed as a placeholder. This will take the form of a circular excavation to a depth of 1 m, and of the same 10 m diameter as the future Portal (see Figure 3). At the corner of Pages’ Walk and Mandela Way the spoil will be mounded to create a conical earthwork, ‘The Watchman’, named in memory of Nelson Mandela’s first job at Crown Mines in Witwatersrand: ‘It was my first sight of South African capitalism at work’, he recounted, ‘and I knew I was in for a new kind of education’. ³⁰ The excavated area will be stabilised with trench sheets, then lined and paved with cobbles. This will create a large sunken circular paved space, surrounded by a ring wall approximately at ground level. A hole will be left in the centre of the paved area, down which to squint. In the same way that the Brunel tunnel was used as a ticketed visitor attraction through the many years pending its completion, the Portal will host social, educational and performance events relating to the inhuman geographies of architecture, with opportunities for the dissemination of a pamphlet on the project, as well as merchandising to fundraise in support of artisanal mineworking communities around the world. ³¹

Figure 3.

Plan and section of the proposed Portal, overlaid on an undated sketch of the Thames Tunnel access shaft from the collection of the Brunel Museum, reproduced with permission. ³² The sketch is accompanied by an explanatory text signed by J. Pinchback and Warrington. Illustration by the author.

An inverted planetary umbilicus

The Portal’s circular paved escutcheon will mark a new ‘axis mundi’, providing the Earth with a ritual navel which will in due course lead down to the inverted planetary umbilicus of the future chute: a Great Hole of Bermondsey. As the birthplace of global capitalism, London is a fitting location for a structure of such global significance. The Old Kent Road area is itself a contemporary focus for urban restructuring: today what was once the cheapest property on the Monopoly board has become the city’s ‘last gentrification frontier’, ³³ the brown livery of its title deed foreshadowing its contemporary status as brownfield land ripe for redevelopment. Ebbensgaard et al. caution that a portal is ‘more than just a conduit, it is a place in its own right; a “solid thing” that harnesses the affective powers of that gravitational pull towards somewhere beyond’. ³⁴ This Portal may therefore be expected to exert an ineluctable attraction, with the risk that surrounding areas – regardless of their regeneration potential – may progressively be sucked down into the chute, like a volcano in reverse. Such a ‘descent narrative’ could bring a whole new meaning to the celebrated Cockney music-hall song ‘Wot Cher! (Knock’d Em in the Old Kent Road)’, ³⁵ and open up new ways of what Harriet Hawkins has termed ‘sensing the subterranean’. ³⁶ As Charlotte Wrigley observes, ‘the further we go into the Earth, the more truth we will find’. ³⁷ Tumbling through seismic waves down into the void, one can only imagine the blistering rush of sound and belated recognition as, in the words of Michael Salu, ‘the petrified voices rise up from earth’. ³⁸

Conclusion: research-creation and serendipity

While the competition entry set out to transpose geographical thinking into architectural discourse, it also somewhat unexpectedly transposed architectural thinking into geographical discourse. In the proposal for Portal, the more risible aspects of the pop-up have re-emerged in the form of satire, and work to reverse-engineer what Japhy Wilson has termed an ‘absurdist geography of the Anthropocene’. ³⁹ This insight from the research-creation process prompts us to reframe the archetypal pop-up itself as a satire on contemporary urbanism, and to attend more closely to absurdist readings of play and counterplay in the mediating environment of the city. This example also suggests that research-creation may have a particular value in the ‘Expanded Field’ where geography and architecture overlap and spatial ‘thought experiments’ can open inquiry to serendipity. ⁴⁰ At a time when contemporary architects are drawing liberally on geographical thinking, geographers might consider the opportunities to work through research-creation with architectural discourse and practice to generate new questions and propositions in geographical thought.